Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” —Ascent from the Underworld
Part 3 of a 6-part series.
We know, too well, that the lived world, of impermanence and darkness and grime, is with us. For the speaker in Ash Wednesday, it is especially so in section three, which through which drifts “vapour in the fetid air,” a scene haunted by “an old man’s mouth driveling […] or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.” These are more sinister than the arid bones and devoured organs of section two.
But the suggestion here, as our protagonist climbs the second and third stair, is one of a demonically irresistible pull to the underworld of the past. And this is best accomplished through an evocation of Eliot’s own earlier work. The realm in which an evening sky can be analogized to “a patient etherised upon a table” and morning dawns with the “faint stale smells of beer” is one unjaundiced by wonder. Consider especially the dizzied midnight urban wanderings of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”:
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions.
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
There is more structure in Ash Wednesday’s stairs, numbered down to their turns. A poetic landscape once marked by half-deserted streets and passageways smelling of steak now takes that most delimited of paths. Encounters with ladies of the evening and hurried businessmen give way to isolation — the inevitable individuality of the conversion experience.
An observation by J.C.C. Mays in his essay “Early Poems: From Prufrock to Gerontion” becomes more striking in such a reading:
Eliot’s images are not presented as self-sufficient points of ecstatic rest. The images […] imply an ache, a yearning after significance, and, while significance is withheld and to the extent that they are exactly perceived, they trouble and disturb. (The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, 112)
But “[a]t the first turning of the third stair” emerges a window — “bellied like the fig’s fruit,” revealing “the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene.” As the pastoral transcends the urban, the mood and imagery brighten:
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Eliot calls in a brief allusion — “Blown hair is sweet” — to John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, a poem ruminating on an artificial ancient world of ritual and gaiety, and carries this forward with a reference to the stair-climber’s distraction by “music of the flute.” But Eliot reaches as well for a more immediate memory — the drawing room settings of his own “Portrait of a Lady” and “Prufrock.” Here, a reference to “brown hair over the mouth blown, / Lilac and brown hair” suggests both
Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
and
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
— fragments of intimate personal observation, light and natural; the dark underworld is abandoned as the speaker makes his Dante-like ascent. Yet these distractions loom, demanding “strength beyond hope and despair.”
It is, you may say, a form of faith. The journey dissolves into a kind of mantra — “ Lord, I am not worthy / Lord, I am not worthy / but speak the word only.” It’s a truncated quotation from Matthew 8:8:
The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.
This centurion was no natural believer in a Jewish teacher, but rather a Roman Gentile, socially positioned to expect a conquered people’s subservience and to seek the divine in the pagan gods — and certainly not the healing intervention of a man like Jesus for for his own ill servant. Eliot omits Jesus’ response in verses 8:10–11:
Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.
With the coda, one alien to a faith hesitantly seeks acceptance; it is left to the Divine to answer.
